Fat City backers are organizing a food truck festival in Metairie’s former nightlife district. Plans call for holding it the night of April 15.

“Pay your taxes at the post office, and then come to Fat City and eat at the food trucks,” Jefferson Parish Councilwoman Cynthia Lee-Sheng said Tuesday in promoting the event. It was Lee-Sheng who persuaded the council to rezone Fat City in 2010, outlawing stand-along bars and “adult” businesses, in hopes of injecting new life into the area.

She said Drago’s restaurant owner Tommy Cvitanovich has agreed to host the New Orleans food truck coalition in the parking lot of an L-shaped retail center he owns at 18th Street and Edenborn Avenue, about a block west of Drago’s. He’s arranging it through the Drago’s Foundation, and any profits will to toward beautifying Fat City, possibly with trees, Lee-Sheng said.

Jefferson Parish all but banned food trucks in 2007, after rolling restaurants arrived to feed post-Katrina construction workers. To make the April 15 event possible, Lee-Sheng is sponsoring a Parish Council resolution, to be considered Wednesday, that would let food trucks operate in Fat City once a month on Mondays from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., when many restaurants are closed.

Rachel Billow of the food truck coalition predicted 10 to 15 trucks serving dishes to eat on the spot or take home. "Everywhere that we have hosted food truck festivals in New Orleans ..., storefront businesses benefit and people appreciate food options that are creative and inexpensive," she said.

There are no immediate plans for food truck rallies after April 15. But Lee-Sheng said: “Hopefully it’ll take off and we can have it on a monthly basis. ... We’re going to try to grow it.”

Billow agreed, saying live music is a possibility in the future. "If there is demand is more, we can have it on a regular basis," she said.

Lee-Sheng's resolution comes a month after she proposed, and immediately scrubbed, a measure that would have allowed food trucks in Fat City every Tuesday from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. That idea raised fears that food trucks would become a permanent presence in Fat City, she said. Cvitanovich was among those objecting.

“Some things are better the second time around,” Lee-Sheng said Tuesday.